RESTful Data Updates with Talend Studio

The Customers DB explorer we created last time was supporting GET queries allowing to return the list of all the customers and the individual customer records.

I've worked recently on enhancing the job that we created last time for supporting more involved GET queries as well as data updates with POST, PUT and DELETE verbs. The presentation is available here.

The demo shows the original ReadCustomers DB job, as well as ReadCustomersAndOrders one which additionally manages GET requests for all the orders of the individual customers and the individual orders only.

The CRUDOrders job shows how to create the new orders for specific customers, update and delete the existing orders, and query the list of all the orders for all the customers. Check how easy it is to configure the job to return a status like 400 in case of attempting to add an order for a non-existent customer.

Note that in this demo I did not really focus on showing how the individual jobs can be created from scratch, in order to keep it shorter in time. There are many other presentations available from Talend Channel, in series like this one, which show how various Talend components can work together, please follow one of those presentations or this one to get more information about it.

In this demo I really wanted to highlight that REST components can manage different HTTP requests (queries, updates, etc), with different, possibly overlapping URI paths and data payloads.

The tRESTRequest component linking HTTP verbs and URI templates is based on the JAX-RS matching algorithm and you can see how flexible the configuration can be, with as many capturing templates as needed added to the relevant HTTP mappings.

More work will be needed for it to support the richer set of media types, in addition to XML, JSON and forms. More flexible support for identifying newly created resources will be needed too. We will be showing the relevant presentations in time.

I'd like to encourage those who are interested to play with creating RESTful jobs and provide us with the feedback.

In meantime I'll work on creating a demo showing how a RESTful job can be packaged as an OSGI bundle and deployed into Karaf with HTTPS and Basic Authentication supported by the container.